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by Peter Dzwig
Predictably the fuss about the demise of Larrabee lingers on.
Let's start at the beginning. Intel has said that the processor will have a continued life as an SDK of some form, and that it will be available to various types who have expressed a desire to be able to use it. Importantly there is Intel's offer for the HPC community to be given access to it.
The reality has to be that Intel could no longer see the market opportunity for the technology. Surely at one time they could do so: it needed that, whatever other possibly apocryphal stories are told about its origins, in order for the management to give it some hope of seeing the commercial light of day.
Had the design run out of engineering steam? Possibly. Larrabee was expected to have seen light of day in the second half of next year. By then the other players in the market will have pushed further ahead. The more so since all the hype will have focused their minds on doing so. By which time perhaps Larrabee would have looked architecturally interesting but behind the curve. So it is far from impossible that the high-ups on the engineering side just decided that they weren't going to be able to squeeze enough out of the technologically. From an engineering perspective they will have learnt many lessons. In fact, we can be almost certain of it. There are even a few hints of Larrabee in the SCC; not many, but some. Larrabee should really be seen as a test bed for ideas: about graphics processors, about memory disposition, about interconnects, programmability and much else besides. That's its real long term value for Intel.
The vacillations over the last couple of years or so, during which we saw specs change and configurations develop and then disappear, has contributed to the market's decreased desire for Larrabee – though most of this downward drive has been driven by people who didn't really know the product. Its slot has meantime largely been filled by NVIDIA et al. and the goalposts have really moved. For Intel this meant that had they ever got to market they would have come in, a perhaps distant, third. That doesn't make business sense for them.
Looked at from a purely commercial perspective then, the decision to remove Larrabee from the likely product list seems entirely reasonable and perhaps inevitable.
In conclusion this was the right decision to take. The technology has gone as far as it can or at least as far as Intel wanted to take it. There has been substantial value added to Intel's business by the teams that contributed the engineering skills and intellectual property, and finally it will be made available to internal and external developers and the HPC community as a development platform.